Homonymy in phonological change

Phonological Change in Cincinatti

Phonological Change in Cincinnati

Lexical Storage and Phonological Change

Empirical investigations of the division of labour between storage and computation in language behaviour can be executed in a number of ways. An obvious one is that of psycholinguistic experimentation. Another way, which will be focused on in this paper, is language change: language change is a psycholinguistic laboratory of nature, a window on how speakers produce and interpret language. For e...

Language acquisition and phonological change

Grammont discusses changes in the development of French from Latin, citing examples of similar patterns in the speech of one child. For instance, the child displayed vowel dissimilation in forms like néni for fini ‘finished’, paralleling historical developments such as Latin finire  Old French fenir ‘to finish’. While Schleicher and Grammont stop short of imputing direct causality, explicit co...

Emergent Behavior in Phonological Pattern Change

Language change has recently come to be seen as a complex dynamical system, along the lines of evolutionary biology and economics, as opposed to previous conceptions as a linear or cyclical system. We model the change of a particular phenomenon, vowel harmony, and look at the conditions under which the trajectory of change matches theoretical and empirical predictions. Our experimental work sho...